


Burning the Candle at Both Ends

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [28]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drunken Flirting, Drunken Shenanigans, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Romantic Fluff, Sleepy Cuddles, Taylor Has Hitoshi's Power, Underage Drinking, gay fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23200882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Being an independent hero is nowhere near as fun as people make it out to be.Especially not in situations like these, or with a power like hers.
Relationships: (kinda) - Relationship, Madison Clements/Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 18
Kudos: 172





	1. Chapter 1

Two in the morning was not a particularly great time for Brockton Bay. It was about when the late-night Protectorate patrols ceased, to be picked up closer to four, and was notoriously known as the “two hours of crime” by nobody who had actually been out on the streets at the time. They were right, in the abstract, you could probably find people making more drug trips and shit at around this time, but the PRT kept an ear to police reports, so no robberies or super visible muggings happened, not with the risk of the PRT telling the heroes who were gratefully heading home to turn back around to arrest somebody with just a touch more brutality than was altogether necessary.

For the most part, it was just... quiet. Distant, cold, the streets were empty, and between the heroes and the gangs themselves keeping one-another in check, not a whole lot of shit happened as a result.

Which, admittedly, was why the screaming was such a shock to hear.

Nightwalking hadn’t truly become a thing for Taylor until she’d gotten her powers. Not to say her sleeping schedule was altogether great before that - she was, after all, an anxious kid and sleep wasn’t so easy when you’re keyed up to eleven - but she’d at least had the decency to burn the moonlight in her room, safe - as much as she could be - in her house. She’d spent a lot of time like that, after mom died, but she was getting distracted.

Peeking her head around the corner, Taylor grimaced at the sight. Two guys with knives each, three girls in various states of drunkenness wearing form-fitting dresses and heels, this was about as typical as you could measurably put it. At least the guys seemed to just be after their purses, not that mugging someone else was exactly a great look either.

Shuffling back behind the brick facade, Taylor reached up to check the stupid slip of a mask was still over her eyes; a domino mask made out of purple plastic of some kind, barely enough to conceal the bridge of her nose and cheekbones. Reaching down to tug the weather-necessitated scarf - but something she was starting to consider to fill out a costume, not that she’d had the money to produce one - up past her mouth, Taylor flexed her fingers and stepped out into the mouth of the alley.

“Hey!”

One of them turned, knife brandished. “The fuck?”

“ **Go to sleep for the next few hours**.”

The man slumped bonelessly, landing awkwardly, neck bent at an odd, but not damaging, angle, face hitting the snow with a thud. The other guy - hereafter referred to as ‘moron number two’ - turned, eyes widening as he took in the sight of his friend, the mask on her face. Taylor smiled, vindication thrumming hot in her veins, warm and expectant.

“Hey,” she said again, slipping one hand into her jacket pocket for the knife she’d slipped into it less than an hour ago. “Your friend’s not too bright, are you going to be the same?”

When faced down by a parahuman of ambiguous power, but enough that verbal commands could put someone to sleep, apparently petty insults she’d half-riffed off of one of Emma’s more cruel jabs about her disposition towards alcoholism - as contrasted by her father - was just too much to keep a cool head. “You bi—”

“ **You also go to sleep for the next few hours.** ”

The man hit the snow with an equally quiet _thump_. Dumb bastard.

All that was left was her, two deeply-breathing morons with knives, and three party girls apparently not expecting something like this to happen when walking around in restrictive dresses and heels tall enough to give them an extra foot of height to play with. Between them, they said nothing, and the atmosphere very comfortably dropped into the pits of hell, tension racketing up. Taylor thought to bring her hands up in surrender, the sort of thing you do around spooked people in general but thought better of it. It’d probably just be best to leave, or something along tho—

“—’aylor?” a worryingly familiar girl asked, stumbling forward on those aforementioned horror-inducing heels. She was wearing a pretty black pencil dress that cut off just above her knees, one hand clutching the strap of her purse while the other pawed at the wall. For a second, Taylor genuinely couldn’t put a name to the face or the body type, but with the same sort of whiplash reserved for 90-degree turns at Mach 3, she very abruptly realized she was staring down the incredibly drunk face of Madison fucking Clements.

Of course she was. Something akin to fury bubbled in her chest for a second, the sudden realization that, after _two fucking months_ of inconsequential night walking and about four crimes stopped to her name, after days of getting nothing done and just walking aimlessly in the most dangerous parts of town, Madison _fucking_ Clements managed to figure out her identity in less than five minutes and with some exposure to her _goddamn fucking voice_.

Without prompt, Madison stumbled forward and comfortably collapsed into Taylor. She took the brunt of a girl a foot shorter than her with the same stoicism she took the dollop of yogurt that the very same girl had dumped into her hair, which was to say with a set jaw and grit teeth. The other two, at the end of the alley, approached a bit more willingly now that Madison had inadvertently vouched for her. Taylor glanced over to them and was relieved to not find the faces of Julia or Heather staring back at her; they seemed to be considerably less drunk than Madison, and it would be across the entirety of Winslow by tomorrow morning if they went to the same school, knowing her luck.

Which speaking of. “Do either of you go to Winslow?”

One of them gave her a queer glance, then flicked their eyes down to Madison. “How old is she?” the girl eventually asked, a quiet weariness in her voice.

Taylor tried to shrug, but Madison’s clinging made that difficult. “I don’t know, sixteen? Fifteen? We’re not friends.”

The other girl snorted. “Sure you aren’t.”

Taylor bit back the impulse to curse.

“That just fits, too,” the first one to speak muttered, glancing back towards what Taylor was starting to think was her friend. “We’re both in college, just by the way,” she added, almost an afterthought. “We’re both just gonna... skedaddle?”

Taylor couldn’t help gawping. “You’re leaving her with _me?_ ” Her voice was a bit shrill near the end of that sentence, which only managed to make Madison nose clumsily into her neck, arms wrapping more tightly around her.

Instead of attempting to reply, the two other girls _in sync_ made to exit, passing her by one-by-one, vanishing around the corner of the alley. Fucking bitches, jesus shit. Shouldering the snuffling Madison a bit, Taylor stepped back over the crunchy pockets of snow, edging towards the opening of the alley, glancing out only to find it mostly empty. Of course it was, of _fucking_ course.

Grimacing, Taylor inched her way to the sidewalk, where she could finally attempt to detach Madison from her. This, of course, went about as well as it reasonably could. One skinny bitch versus a smaller skinny bitch rewarded her with precisely sweet fuck all, so by the time she had worn herself out trying to peel Madison off, she didn’t even have the energy to try anymore. Huffing, Taylor rummaged around in her pocket, ignoring Madison’s annoyed grumbles, and retrieved the burner phone she’d spent less than twenty dollars on after finding it on sale.

Dialling the crime hotline - because dialling 911 was in bad taste, in most cases - Taylor tucked the phone against her ear and did her best to reposition Madison away from her front, managing to eventually get her nestled mostly against her right side, still nosing petulantly at her throat, with the majority of her body wrapped around her ribs and arm.

“Brockton Bay Police, how may we help you?” A bored, almost yawning voice asked at the other end of the call.

Uncharitable as it was, Taylor had to resist the urge to rip into them for that sort of disinterest. “Hi, I’ve got two guys here at the front of Benny’s on Westphal Street who tried to mug some girls? They’re unconscious for the next few hours, and it’d probably be best to pick them up.”

“Ma’am, who’s calling?” The voice at the other end asked, sounding just as bored and sedate. Ugh.

Gritting her teeth, Taylor wiggled, trying to free herself from Madison, very abruptly feeling cramped and somewhat claustrophobic. “Snark.”

“‘Kay,” the voice mumbled, the sound of clicking keys and some shuffling papers echoing in the background. “Oh, right, you got a bulletin from the PRT—”

“Not interested,” she snapped, letting some of the heat through in her voice. She pulled the phone from her ear.

“Miss, wai—” _click_.

Stuffing the dumb thing back into her pocket, Taylor glanced back at Madison, who had pulled herself free from her neck and was now looking at her with lidded, dazed eyes. She was completely out of it, if the hugging thing wasn’t clear, and even if she had experienced a sudden change of heart, Taylor wouldn’t hug _herself_ with the plethora of spoiled shit they’d dumped on her head at various points throughout the year, so it couldn’t be that. She couldn’t just leave her, not out here, not after that, could she?

“Alright,” she muttered, wiggling a bit more until all Madison had her tourniquet of a grip on was her arm. “Where do you live? I’m walking you home.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Madison mumbled out, raising one arm to point vaguely towards the suburbs down the hill. “That’a way.”

So they went, mostly in silence. Walking with Madison clinging to her was significantly harder than she’d expected it to be, and for a few minutes, she pitied Emma for being the victim of it. No wonder Madison was always on the fringes of the group, if her hugging habits led to things like this.

Stepping out onto flat land after a trial-by-fire down an icy hill, Taylor couldn’t help it anymore. “Why do you guys bully me?”

Madison blinked slowly, a bit like a cat. “‘Cos it’s fun.”

“Is this a sexual thing?” slipped out of Taylor’s mouth before she could reasonably stop it.

This time, with what felt like crude and imprecise grace, Madison batted her eyelashes at her. “It could be if you want it to be, m’got you as my own cape girlfriend now.”

That... _what_. “What.”

“Emma gets one, I want one too,” was the eloquent response Madison offered before tilting dangerously towards Taylor. With all the force she could muster, being tired - emotionally, mentally _and_ physically, oh boy it was like she won the fucking _misery lottery_ \- as she was, Taylor layered her palm over Madison’s face and pushed her away, getting a bunch of giggles and a fucking _lick of all things_ on the palm of her hand for her troubles.

“For starters,” Taylor grit out, feeling the heat rise to her ears. “You’re drunk, so no, and _secondly_ , just no in _general_.”

Retrieving her hand from Madison’s face and wiping it off on the thread of her jeans, Taylor yanked a bit to get her moving again towards where the drunk moron had been pointing towards. Between Madison’s unsteady gait and Taylor’s own fatigue, it took a bit longer than was reasonably acceptable to get to the next intersection, to which her tag-along pointed in what was starting to feel like a random direction, this time towards ‘Cheshire Street’. Considering that things couldn’t reasonably get any worse, and that she wasn’t really wearing a costume, just a jacket, some jeans, boots and a mask, Taylor reached up, peeled the mask from her face, and then tucked it into her left hand pocket, the one Madison wasn’t currently trying her best to cling to.

“Are you wearing makeup?” Madison mumbled, though this time with a touch more coherency than she’d had over the last seven and a half minutes.

Shrugging placidly, Taylor glanced away. “I do know how to use makeup,” she offered. “It’s just that dad isn’t really able to afford constant use, and I don’t really like wearing it. It just keeps people from recognizing me, _most of the time_.”

Madison giggled, because of course she did.

Ignoring her, the two of them finally came to a stop at the front of a quaint, still-illuminated two story house with a lawn covered in snow. Madison detached herself off of her side with ease, and while she spent the next few seconds shaking the blood back into it, Madison slipped out of her heels and began to trot towards the front door. Before she could even clear the front porch, the door opened to an immensely worried looking woman in her mid forties with a near-identical crop of hair to Madison’s. It was, frankly, somewhat jarring to see.

After a bit of arguing between the two of them that Taylor couldn’t hear from where she was, the woman directed her gaze towards Taylor and with what looked like _immense reluctance_ waved her over. Not entirely willingly, Taylor crept up the driveway, making sure to avoid the few tracks of nearly-invisible ice, coming to a stop just short of the front porch. It was a bit warmer this close, with heat billowing out through the opened door, Madison having escaped into the confines of a warm house sometime into her trek.

“Thank you,” the woman said after a moment of silence. “You don’t look like you went out clubbing, so I’m going to assume her saying you were her ‘superhero’ was a... _joke_.”

Taylor kept her face carefully blank and took the out when it was offered. “Yeah, I’m just her designated... walker. The people who she was with phoned me to come get her.”

The woman’s face smoothed out at that comment. “I hope she didn’t wake you,” the woman said genuinely, folding her hands together. “Still, thank you so much. We found her bed empty when my husband went to use the bathroom, and we’ve been worried since. Do you need a drive home?”

Taylor shook her head. “No, Mrs. Clements. I’ll be fine.”

Providing one last polite smile, the woman said a quickly-muttered ‘good-night’ before just about shutting the door in her face.

Not bothering to try her luck, Taylor walked unsteadily back down the driveway, stopping only to slip her mask back on her face once she was a few houses down from Madison’s.

Surely, nothing else could go wrong, not after all of _that_.


	2. Candlelight Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madison, Taylor finds out, has _really_ weird friends. The type of weird friends to host a party primarily to watch Degrassi on the fifth floor of a mansion while drunk.

Making her way up the gratuitous, snaking driveway of Dean Stansfield, Taylor quietly wondered what had driven her life in this direction, of all places. Not, of course, that she had anything _against_ Dean, or the yearly party he held when his parents went to god-knows-where for half a month, but it wasn’t like she’d been raised with an unbiased hand on the topic of the Stansfields. Cumulatively, the Stansfields were responsible for the founding of Brockton Bay, had effectively owned the city close to three separate times, and had remained strongly involved with the local politics ever since. If someone was anything but the entrenched upper class, who had dwindled as time and monopolies took their toll, they rarely had anything particularly positive to say about the Stansfields. 

Hell, she was pretty sure if someone let it slip to her father that she’d been at the Stansfields’ manor during the tail end of a party, he’d probably be more upset with her that she was near a Stansfield than he would be by the implication she was partying at three in the morning. 

But then, everyone had their priorities. 

Glancing down at her phone as it dinged, another message from Madison, Taylor buried the grimace that wanted to crawl over her face. Even _she_ had her priorities, regardless of how much they tended to use her as a chaperone for their poor decisions.

 _You almost here?_ The text read, much like the last couple had. Madison had been getting antsier and antsier the closer she got, which was a little grating if she was being honest. The first text itself had come at the tail end of another relatively boring and mostly uneventful patrol close to half an hour ago, something about Madison wanting another escort home. This trip was the fifth time she had agreed to help her home, largely because there always seemed to be at least _some_ reason for it. After all, if she hadn’t come the first time Madison requested help, it was likely she would’ve ended up babysitting a roofied college-aged girl next to the Palanquin until morning in the middle of February. 

So, really, while she didn’t _regret_ giving Madison her burner phone’s number, she also kinda did. Ignorance is, after all, bliss, and if she hadn’t given up her number to begin with, she would’ve never known, but now that she _did_ , well, it was a bit more difficult to ignore. Admittedly, some of the more recent requests had been a little frivolous, mostly just walking Madison home because she wasn’t apparently too keen on being isolated in Merchant territory, not that Taylor could blame her, but it had never been truly meaningless, not really.

Glancing back up, Taylor swerved her walk to the side, avoiding the stumbling gait of a black-haired guy looking to be maybe fourteen as most. Her face contorted a bit at the scent of vomit and booze that just about radiated out from him, but seeing as the guy just kept on stumbling down towards the opened gate, she was pretty sure he either didn’t care what she thought about his hygiene or didn’t notice. 

Turning her gaze towards the manor, Taylor tried very hard not to feel intimidated. It was a rough, U-shaped thing, with white stone pillars, distended balconies, and huge windows. It encircled the end of the very same long driveway she’d been walking up, a driveway that ended in something vaguely reminiscent of a roundabout. It dwarfed the majority of its peers, towering over the middling-rich suburbia that surrounded it, a bright, unavoidable reminder of the opulence of the Stansfields. 

Swallowing down the little kernel of anger, reminding herself that, no, Dean had really nothing to do with the shit beliefs and practices of his parents, Taylor hunched her shoulders and made a line for the front doors. There were a few people outside, mostly near their cars or laying on the grass, red plastic cups littered around the area, but nobody really paid any attention to her. While she hadn’t come dressed up to the nines, jogging pants, tights, running shoes, a t-shirt and a zippered sweater wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either, and there were more people wearing jeans and t-shirts than there wasn’t, at a glance. 

Speaking of the front doors, Taylor got her first peek into the embodiment of a lot of her own father’s rage, and felt a bit of it, even if only for a second. Through jammed-open doors was what could only be called a foyer, all pompous with glassy floor tiles and a massive, dark-wood staircase that ran through its center before splitting off into two paths. There were people here too, though significantly less than to be found outside. In particular, a miserable-looking blonde girl with bright green eyes stared at her for a moment before slumping, glancing back towards the cup in her hands, looking almost disappointed.

 _What floor_? Texting was still a bit weird on the fingers—she was too used to larger keyboards, and something about using a cramped keypad made her want to sit it down on a table and try her luck with both of her fingers, but like most of her impulses recently, it was easily buried.

 _Fifth_ was the quick-fire response she got back, barely seconds later. 

Taylor screwed her eyes up into her head, took a steadying breath, and tried very hard not to pitch her phone into something. Of course, it’d be the fifth floor, why make things easy? God, if only the Stansfields weren’t so unimaginably pretentious and bougie, they might fucking get an elevator and not make her have to wear her legs out just so she could fucking take care of her friend.

...Actually, _was_ Madison her friend?

Questions for later.

Sparing another glance at the freckled blonde girl, Taylor rolled her shoulders in a lazy shrug and made her way towards the stairway, ignoring all the tempting little doorways that led to other wings of the manor. The stairs themselves - not the railing - were carpeted, though they looked a little more than worse for wear, so Taylor took absolutely no pleasure in intentionally wiping the heel of her shoe off on an unstained spot. None whatsoever. 

One flight of stairs and some awkward navigating later, she’d somehow managed to make her way to the second floor. This, it would turn out, was where the majority of people still left hanging around at three in the morning were. There was a pronounced, heady aroma of weed, beer bottles absolutely choked the area off, the lights had been dimmed, and the steady rhythmic music she’d heard downstairs now had a source: a massive radio-speaker system. There were about twenty-ish people present, most of them collapsed in chairs and beanbags, what had once been probably one of the manor’s living rooms - if the television was any indication - now occupied by a bunch of stoned, drunk, and sometimes both, teenagers. 

Not for the first time, nobody paid attention to her. Most of them were focused on the television which was playing what looked like RoboCop, a novel if somewhat dated Aleph movie that had a strong, anti-police message and a dystopian take on corporate cruelty that was absolutely, one-hundred-percent ruined by the inclusion of a big Tinker baddie - though, back then they’d had a half-dozen names for the classification - who was the reason why everything went wrong, and probably killed puppies in his spare time, expertly avoiding actually criticizing anything but the actions of a single person. 

Closing her eyes, her lids unexpectedly heavy, Taylor tried to refocus. She had to find Madison, she had to take what would be a drunk-off-her-ass Madison _home_ , and then she could wander back to her house, probably in the tiny hours of the morning, and pretend to her father that she was just out jogging again instead of spending the entire night walking around looking for people to beat up. 

Goddamn, maybe she _really_ should’ve listened to Assault when he gave her that Wards pitch. At least then they might curtail _some_ of her bad habits. 

Shaking her head before opening up her eyes, Taylor focused in on the stairs again. For the second floor, they were less dominating, having been sort of pushed off to the side, still mostly free-standing but cleverly out of the way and used to frame another door. They were a bit steeper than the main ones but significantly less mazelike, and more to the point, they didn’t lead into another drug-hazy living room. Apparently, most of the party had been clustered away on the second floor in its entirety, as aside from the steady beat of the music below, the third floor was just shy of completely untouched. Hell, someone had even gone through the effort of putting plastic sheets over all the furniture, and the light was left on instead of half-dimmed and substituted with blue-and-green Christmas lights.

Though, realistically, why on fucking earth did someone have _two_ living rooms, stacked right on top of one another? The place even looked to be roughly put together in the same way too, with the television in mostly the same place as it had been a floor below, and the pair of couches on the floor below kinda mirrored the ones up here. The staircase was even the same, though that just made it easier for her to find it, considering she just had to circle around to climb up the next one. 

The fourth floor was just completely empty, which wasn’t a shock but did make her feel a bit bitter. The other parts of the fourth floor probably had furnished rooms and shit, sure, but why even bother making something this big if you don’t go through the effort of filling it with shit? The only big difference about the fourth floor living-slash-open-area-room was that this one had a balcony, though considering there was nothing _on_ the balcony, and the sliding glass door that led to it had curtains hanging over it, Taylor doubted it was actually used with any level of frequency. 

Fucking wealthy people. At least pretend to be doing something with all the land you’re taking up. 

Coming to a halt at the base of the stairs, Taylor stared up into the relative dim of the fifth floor. She could just barely hear the sound of something up there, not the rhythmic pulse of music but rather conversation, probably from a speaker if the volume was any indication. Checking her phone, which didn’t have any new texts, Taylor quietly shuffled the thing back into her pocket and started her ascent, the sound of background noise and voices becoming more clear as she got closer. 

Finally passing through the threshold and onto the fifth floor, Taylor’s eyes immediately focused down on Madison. The girl in question was laid out on a cushion, staring blearily across the room at a wall-mounted television that looked to be playing a television show that didn’t seem all that familiar. On the couch beside her oversized cushion, Dean Stansfield and what she _assumed_ \- going by the closeness - was Victoria Dallon were situated on the couch together, shoulders brushing against one another, the latter looking more bored than anything else, and on the other side of that couch, in yet more cushions, were a few other people she couldn’t really put a name to. 

Picking her phone back out of her pocket, Taylor quickly typed “I’m here” into it and sent. Madison jolted at the sound of her phone lighting up with a text, a birdlike chirp, glanced down, then snapped her head around, her face going bright and wide and full-smiled when she caught sight of her. Taylor, reflexively, sunk a bit further into her own shoulders, trying to mentally will the heat out of her face, to little success. 

“Taaaaaaaay!” Madison cheered, scrambling over her cushion and bolting, looking more like a whirlwind of brown hair as she sprinted across the floor, arms outstretched, and made a solid collision with herself. It was, honest to god, only her stranglehold of a grip on the stairs’ railing that she and Madison didn’t make a trip back down to the fourth floor. 

Grunting, Taylor pressed a bit forward, trying to maneuver herself a bit away from the dangerous drop behind her, only to be rewarded with Madison tucking herself in against her front and pressing her nose - weirdly cold, what was she, a dog? - into the skin of her collarbone, a burst of giggles spilling out of Madison’s mouth as she tightened her hug. 

Something relaxed, her shoulders lowering, the tense of her jaw leaving. A breathy huff left her lips before she knew to stop it, the tension in her stomach unspooling, the worry - had it been that? - leaking out of her pores. Taylor found her arms wrapping around Madison in turn, tugging her in close, getting another laugh out of her. 

Resisting the urge to bury her face in the crown of Madison’s head, Taylor glanced up, catching Dean’s eye. He stared at her for a moment, polite curiosity on his face, his head slightly atilt, a bit like a confused dog. Flicking her eyes slightly to the left, the broad smile of Victoria gleamed back at her, her eyes lidded and looking entirely too smug. Wordlessly, the teenage superheroine reached out one arm towards one of the several people she had no name for, and with what looked like _great_ reluctance, a guy who had to be close to six-foot-five and still somehow looking like he belonged in middle school placed a twenty-dollar bill in the flat of her palm, which she retrieved with a cackle of triumph. 

“Your friends are weird,” Taylor blurted before she could really think better of it.

Madison snorted, still not unfurling from her front, arms still tightly wrapped around her ribs. “You would know.”

“I have you,” Taylor pointed out, again _mostly_ against her better judgement. 

Madison pulled her face back from her collarbone and grinned up at her, all teeth and unspoken promise. The look, once actually kinda... _intense_ , was almost immediately ruined by the lascivious waggle of her eyebrows, which managed to startle a bark of laughter out of Taylor.

“You do,” Madison finally said, pressing her face back into her neck. 

“Really gay and cute, you two,” someone - a quick glance up made it clear it was Victoria - shouted, fingers waggling at them. “But uh, we gotta know if you’re going now, or if you wanna stick around for the rest of this Degrassi episode? Because I can only handle so much teenage drama in one place.”

“But, you’re a teenager,” the too-tall-and-too-young-looking guy said, sounding almost put off. 

Victoria snapped her head around, glaring at him with faux-imperiousness. “Your name is _Chad_ , you get no say in this!” 

Glancing back down at Madison, Taylor tilted her head to one side, trying to impart ‘you can choose, I’m fine with whatever’ into a motion and probably not getting very far. 

“...Can we?” Madison asked, almost timidly. Too timidly, really. 

Taylor tensed, paused, then relaxed. Everyone gets nervous, she shouldn’t judge. “S’up to you.” 

One of Madison’s arms unclenched from around her midsection, fingers sliding down the fabric of her arm, tangling with the hem of her sweater, before finally lacing themselves with hers. 

Taylor felt her face go the sort of red that was reserved for fire trucks. 

Madison uncurled from her front, her grip on Taylor’s fingers tight and unwavering as she gently, ever-so-carefully, started to walk the two of them towards the couch. Now that she was closer, she _could_ identify a few faces from Winslow, who apparently could also now pick up on the fact that she was Taylor Hebert and all the baggage that went with it. Even Victoria stalled a bit when she caught sight of her face, but out of all of them, she was also the quickest to revert to neutrality, the expression accompanied by a ‘well, what can you do’ shrug of her shoulders. 

After a bit of maneuvering, Madison finally hauled the two of them into the pile of cushions, primarily into the massive one she had been sitting in, hauling Taylor more or less right into her side, hip-against-hip. She squirmed a little, trying to at least find a way to not feel like she was about to slide off the cushion onto the floor, only for Madison to adjust her weight and pointedly drop both legs over her lap, hooking her legs a little to stop her from sliding any further down the pile. 

“You two situated?” Dean asked, having risen just high enough to prop his chin on Victoria’s head, not that her wordless noise of complaint made it seem like she was enjoying his bony chin digging into her scalp. He waggled the remote at the two of them, before pointing it over his shoulder in the general direction of the television, where a freeze-frame of two boys glaring angrily at one-another had settled across the screen. Apparently, at some point, someone had paused the show—she hadn’t even noticed. “I’ll take that as a yes. Starting the episode back up, then.”

The television cracked back to life, and just as quickly the two guys on the screen started shouting. Not entirely interested in it, even as the shouting devolved into a fistfight which panned away to show as one guy pushed too hard, caused another to tumble into the ground with a cry of pain, Taylor glanced back down at Madison, whose eyes were glued curiously to the screen, and who had started to tug her in closer with gentle flexes of her leg. Reaching out, Taylor twined their fingers again, looking away before Madison could look back at her.

The scene changed, pulled away to show an alarm clock that started to ring. A truly, _genuinely_ awful song came on, accompanied by someone pulling up their pants and one image of a dude... worshipping a bike? She wasn’t going to try to decipher that.

Startling a bit when Madison leaned in, pressing her cheek into Taylor’s shoulder, having somehow managed to bend her body to do so, Taylor watched as the intro scene faded to black. Leaning a bit to the side, she pressed her nose into Madison’s hair, found her eyes drifting from the screen, a certain relaxed haze coming over her. Her hair smelled a bit like citrus, with floral accents, but it wasn’t terribly intense or offensive; just nice, light and airy. 

Fingers combed through her hair, pulled them away from her face, tucking them behind one ear. She tried to blink, head fuzzy and warm, opening her mouth to question the blurs on the screen, but got quietly hushed instead, unintelligible voices murmuring between one-another, fingers scraping gently against her scalp. She shifted, reached out to the warmth, felt her fingers lace together with something in return, before shutting her eyes, just to rest, just to get her bearings. 

Scratchy fabric pressed against her skin, drawing her back up. She blinked, everything blurry and indistinct, hard to focus on, her head foggy, thick with syrup. She tried to shift, tried to move, only for possessive hands to clench, for arms to pull, drawing her in close. Citrus sang against her nose, a smell that was familiar, nice, something she liked. Something heavy was thrown over one leg, skin against skin, the room dark and empty and warm and—and... she drifted, fell back under the thrall of warmth and haze. 

* * *

It was a bright, nippy morning, and Taylor hated every single second of it. 

“You look hungover and you didn’t even get drunk,” Madison complained, looking entirely in her own element, the only evidence that she wasn’t doing so hot herself being a pair of sunglasses and her habit of never turning to face the sun. 

Rolling her eyes, Taylor shifted, trying to work another kink out of her back as she stretched. The stairway down to the front driveway was mostly empty, people had probably left a while ago, leaving just those who didn’t have cars or getaway drivers. She was on one of the top stairs, mostly because she was still trying to work out this whole ‘walking’ thing, and wasn’t really in the mood to get laughed at by Victoria by needing a girl a foot shorter than her to help her down the stairs. 

To be honest, she wasn’t actually hung-over or anything, she had just... crashed. It had been a rough week for her, maybe fairly so, and she’d slept for maybe three days of it. When it had come time for her body to shut down, she just so happened to have done so with Madison on the fifth floor of a McMansion, and coming out of a crash meant physical weakness and overall dizziness. Sure, it was probably horrible for her health that she was staying up that long, but the only person who could complain about it was herself.

Well, and Madison apparently. 

“You know, you could’ve just told me if you need someone else in your bed to sleep. I’m apparently _really_ good at that.”

Taylor did not choke. She, in fact, made no sound and was not laughed at by Madison in return, and definitely didn’t try to get up and walk down the stairs to save her dignity, only to nearly trip and needing to use Madison for support _once again_ to get over basic functions of geometry and architecture. 

Certainly not. She absolutely developed a new part of her power and teleported down the stairs. That’s totally the observed reality, please ignore the hyena-woman trying very hard not to laugh at her. 

“Bitch,” Taylor muttered mutinously, whiffing her attempt to kick up some of the Stansfields’ perfectly primped lawn. 

Madison cackled, looking red and flushed. “Liar, you love me!”

She did.

...

Wait, shit. 

Burying _that_ crisis somewhere in the back of her brain and swallowing down the uncharacteristic hysteric giggle that threatened to burst out, Taylor occupied herself with a few more stretches, trying to work one of the more stubborn kinks out of the curve of her back. 

Glancing back towards the gentle dip in the driveway, Taylor froze solid. Not-so-distantly, the image of her father, a man she knew her father hated, and said man’s wife, were climbing up the long stretch of the highway, talking civilly, something of a contrast to the one time she’d heard her father nearly rattle the house with his inspired tirade against the entrenched despotic upper-class. 

Madison, apparently able to pick up on that much social nuance, just came to a stop by her side, reaching out to take her hand. They’d been holding hands for a bit now, tangled fingers and sweaty palms, and... well, it wasn’t awful. 

“Taylor,” Dad said gruffly once he’d finally gotten close enough to not need to yell. His expression was carefully blank, and while there wasn’t any _anger_ beneath it, it wasn’t hard to identify the distinct feeling that he wasn’t _really_ on her team right about now.

Mr. Stansfield, face lit with almost palpable mischief, just smiled amicably at her. “I’m glad to finally meet the daughter of Mr. Hebert,” he said jovially, with all the tact that he tended to have with him. “I’m sure Dean’s cleaning up, or at least trying to, what with Victoria around. It’s been pleasant to talk to you outside of the office, Daniel, do keep my card, would you?”

Dad said nothing, probably because if he did it wouldn’t be anything pleasant. 

Mrs. Stansfield waved her fingers at them as she and her husband strolled past, a gesture strikingly familiar to the one she’d seen Victoria and Dean try to replicate. At least she knew where it came from.

Once they were a sufficient enough distance away, Dad, with one brow cocked and an unimpressed look gradually growing to fill his empty one, glanced between the two of them and their entangled fingers. He’d never made her feel shame, and he wasn't doing so now, either, but something about his scrutiny made her vaguely worried. 

“Come on then,” he finally said, turning. “To the car, we’ll drop Madison off first before we talk about how much shit you’re in.”

Madison choked, apparently startled by the casual use of language. 

The walk to the car was long and more than a little awkward, mostly because Madison seemed to be half-awed, half-bewildered by her father, and spent most of the time alternating between strangling her hand in a tight grip and brushing her thumb in circles over hers. None of it was unpleasant, really, it helped calm her down in a way she didn’t really _get_ , and it was probably the only thing stopping her from trying to fill the silence with mindless chatter. 

Unlocking the door, Dad leaned in to pop the rest, motioning for them forward. Madison let go of her hand, palm sweaty and cold, before rushing over to the other side to get in. She popped her door just the same, relishing what was probably the last few seconds of freedom and open-air she’d see for a while, before finally clambering in, her hand quickly reclaimed by Madison once they’d both gotten their seatbelts on. 

The car started, wheezed unpleasantly, and then began to move, making a u-turn through the oversized driveway and starting back down towards the gated entrance, which was still open from the night before. 

“It’s fine if you’re dating,” Dad said completely unprompted, yanking a startled wheeze out of Taylor’s mouth. “You know your mother’s history”—she did not, in fact, know, what the fuck—“and I’m hardly going to throw stones about you being gay. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is your choice of venues, or allies, or _whatever_.”

Madison stared at her, completely bewildered. Taylor just shut her eyes, reaching up with her free hand to massage the space between her brows, and listened as her father started a rant she had heard more than a few times in passing. 

He was only a quarter of the way through it when they deposited a thoroughly confused-looking Madison on her front porch, to the unimpressed looks of her father and mother, though they seemed more resigned than anything else. 

“Furthermore, Taylor, I get that they can be _savvy_ and nice to be around, but honestly, of all people, the _Stansfields_?”

Sighing, Taylor tucked her face against her hands, and quietly prayed that he’d just get to her punishment, whatever that might be. 


End file.
